from the abuse-of-power dept

Why is it always the state Attorneys General? Time and time again we see examples of state AGs who seem to think they're above the law and can abuse their position to attack those they dislike. The latest? Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette. Apparently, he was none too happy that Huffington Post reporter Dana Liebelson was investigating juvenile prison conditions in the state, and had a representative from his office follow her for two hours across the state to slap her with two separate, but equally questionable, subpoenas, demanding all of her notes:

As Liebelson notes on her Twitter feed, she had had permission to visit the prisons, and agreed not to bring in a recording device. She noted that she followed all the rules that she was given for reporting from the prison -- and yet, she immediately gets slapped with a subpoena demanding her notes.

And she wasn't the only one. Another report notes that Schuette alsosent a subpoena to Michigan Radio, demanding its recording of a prisoner/attorney interview.

Of course, after Liebelson's story started getting social media and press attention, Schuette's office quickly backed down, and promised to rescind the subpoenas. The excuse given by his office, to MLive, is absolutely ridiculous:

A spokesperson for Schuette, responding to a request for comment, issued a statement indicating a civil service attorney had been "doing the department's job of defending the state" from lawsuits.

The attorney "followed a common legal procedure" of subpoenaing information from individuals "entering Michigan prisons to speak to prisoners who are suing state taxpayers," said spokesperson Andrea Bitely.

That makes no sense at all. Defending the state from lawsuits should never involve sending reporters subpoenas demanding all of their notes. It's a clear intimidation technique that violates all basic concepts of a free and open press.

from the can-i-get-a-refund? dept

It's been quite a while since we've had much news about the TSA's nudie scanners, other than the admission by one TSA employee that they, you know, don't work to do anything other than show people being naked. Yes, the federal government's oddly belated overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which they don't think will be attempted again, required a massive influx of taxpayer cash to pay for all this uselessness. That would be your money, my money, all of our money going into a program that didn't work, wasn't needed, and violated our rights. But a story of this kind of futility and waste needs a nice little bow put on it for an ending. The federal government never seems to fail us in this kind of request.

Where are those nudie scanners now that they're being transitioned out of airports? Why, they're in prisons of course, because piling them up on the federal curb would make them look stupid.

So far, 154 of the machines have been transferred to prisons in states including Iowa, Virginia and Louisiana. It’s a good fit because privacy concerns raised by airport passengers do not apply in many cases to prisoners, according to TSA.

“TSA and the vendor are working with other government agencies interested in receiving the units for their security mission needs and for use in a different environment,” TSA spokesman Ross Feinstein said.

Well, hey, that's great. The forty-million dollars of doesn't-work the TSA had in place are being transferred to not work in other federal institutions. And, because nobody worth their political salt is going to bother to stick up for prisoners, there's much less push back there. Nevermind that these devices still don't do the job they claim to do. Nevermind that forty-million bucks were wasted. Prisons! That's the answer, because this is America, damn it, and if there's one thing we know, it's how to bolster our already staggering jail-economy.

Members of Congress had also raised issues about the safety of the machines and their scanning technology, asking the National Academy of Sciences to explore whether people are exposed to unsafe levels of radiation during the process.

Doesn't matter, because the prisoners are all evil and whatnot and safety is no longer a concern. Meanwhile, this transfer of uselessness should be exhibit A at any hearing in which someone in national security insists they need something expensive in order to keep people safe. It's time for some accountability, please.

from the another-obvious-conclusion-that-took-a-lawsuit-to-reach dept

Prison Legal News has been battling with the largest private prison corporation in the US, Corrections Corporation of America, over the control of records requested through a Texas Public Information Act request. The organization took CCA to court last May in hopes of kicking loose records pertaining to a now-closed prison.

A state judge ruled Wednesday that the nation's largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is a "governmental body" for purposes of the Texas Public Information Act, "and subject to [the] Act's obligations to disclose public information."

The corporation had argued that it was exempt from public information requests because it was not a government agency. As Prison Legal News noted in its May 2013 filing for summary judgement, this distinction was meaningless on several levels. It pointed to the Fifth Circuit Court's "Kneeland test," a list of three specifications that, if met, would redefine a private corporation as a public entity due to the extent of its interaction and reliance on government bodies.

An entity that receives public funds is treated as a governmental body under the PIA:

1. unless the private entity’s relationship with the government imposes a specific and definite obligation to provide a measurable amount of service in exchange for a certain amount of money as would be expected in a typical arms-length contract for services between a vendor and purchaser;

2. if the private entity’s relationship with the government indicates a common purpose or objective or creates an agency-type relationship between the two; or

3. if the private entity’s relationship with the government requires the private entity to provide services traditionally provided by governmental bodies.

As the filing noted, CCA met all three requirements. The corporation receives public funds to run its prisons, receiving a certain amount of money per prisoner housed. It is also instructed to maintain critical systems, etc. at all times, despite a fluctuating inmate count, for which it also receives public funding.

Quite obviously, Texas and CCA are also reliant on each other ("agency-type relationship") in other ways. The state prosecutes criminals and needs somewhere to house them, which CCA provides. This also satisfies the third stipulation, that being that CCA provides a service normally provided by the government.

In a one-page ruling, the judge granted summary judgement, ordering the company to hand over records to Prison Legal News. This is one small victory against the increasingly privately-owned prison system in the US. By turning over imprisonment to private corporations, the US government has both perverted incentives (by making imprisonment a profitable enterprise) and allowed public records to be hidden away behind FOI exemptions meant to shield private companies' trade secrets from their competitors.

from the ain't-gonna-work dept

Wikipedia gets, what I think is, a bad rap by the general public due to users being able to edit its pages. This isn't to say that there aren't ever problems, but I tend to think that the community does a pretty decent job of policing itself and much of the false-information-hand-wringing is much to do about nothing. Additionally, the benefits, both of all the good information on the site and the potential benefits of being a great Wiki editor, are far beyond any negative effects of false information. And, for anyone who does attempt to game the information on the site, the consequences can be awful.

Take, for instance, what has happened now that Geo Group, a company that runs for-profit prisons, has a spokesman running around trying to delete negative information about them from their Wikipedia page. This began shortly after Geo Group inked a deal with Florida Atlantic University for the naming rights to their football stadium, because nothing says irony quite like a prison name for college football, where the athletes are grossly exploited for the profit of the NCAA.

This, obviously, is seen as bad form on Wikipedia and editors almost immediately began fighting back, both restoring the deleted section and calling out Cohen. But Abe wasn't done. After the page was restored, an anonymous IP address which leads back to Geo Group's servers showed up on the page claiming that the PR information Abe had added wasn't PR information at all, but was an accurate reflection of the company's history.

The result of all this nonsense? Well, none of it is good for Geo Group. Deadspin picked up the story and there's little doubt their massive audience is now exponentially more aware of some of the company's more controversial moments, which include mistreatment of prisoners, withholding prisoner medication, withholding medical care for prisoners resulting in their deaths, and guards engaging in sexual intercourse with prisoners. Like me, it's likely that as of last week, most people didn't even know a company called Geo Group existed. But now, because they want to get into the football sponsorship business, and also because they think they can just remove negative information off of the internet, a whole lot of people are more informed about that negative information.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.

More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today-perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system-in prison, on probation, or on parole-than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under "correctional supervision" in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

So, what's contributing to this continued escalation of imprisonment? (Hint: it's not an increase in violent crime. Those numbers are at their lowest level in nearly a half-century.) No, the problem is that the justice system has been put into the position of redefining "criminal activity" while simultaneously having its sentencing discretion removed by national policies:

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice," was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, "procedural" nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; "zero tolerance" policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment.

Exhibit A: The War on Drugs. Nothing has been more ineffectual, for a greater period of time, than the supposed War on Drugs. This is directly linked with the other points on Stuntz's list. "Zero-tolerance" policies have taken any sort of perspective or judgment out of the hands of judges and turned possession of minor amounts of controlled substances into 30-year sentences. Zero-tolerance is creeping into other areas of life as well, evidenced by public schools punishing 4-year-old students for hugging each other ("sexual harassment") or the fact that the highest percentage of additions to sexual offender registries are teen boys between the ages of 14-16. Between the growth of zero-tolerance and the expanding definition of such terms as "cyberbullying," "sexual assault" and "terrorism," it's not likely that our nation's incarceration rate will decline any time soon.

This plays right into the hands of the beneficiaries of draconian, zero-tolerance policies: privately-owned prisons.

The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It's hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

This is at least as chilling as watching our representatives blithely trampling our civil rights, perhaps even more so as you realize that there is likely some connection between mandatory sentencing and the lobbying efforts of private prisons. The enforcement arms of the US government have been pushing to criminalize more and more acts under ambiguous titles such as "cyberterrorism." There has also been little serious effort made towards scaling back either the War on Drugs or the War on Terrorism, despite all evidence pointing to minimal success in either venture.

Perhaps as a result of declining violent crime statistics, many law enforcement entities are expanding their surveillance areas with the use of spy drones. It's tough to justify budget increases if you don't have enough arrests to back up expenditures on military weapons and vehicles. The solution seems to be to cast the net wider and worry about sorting out the innocents after a few hours (or days) in lockup.

The collected legislative bodies of the United States are pitching in as well, with 40,000 new laws scheduled to go on the books in 2012 alone. While many simply deal with compliance issues or budget woes, the sheer number of new laws is bound to catch a few more "criminals," if for nothing more than a short stay for misdemeanors. Even existing laws, like the 111-year-old Lacey Act, are being used to criminalize citizens, as Gibson Guitars can attest.

In addition, immigration policies are swelling America's imprisoned ranks. ICE has detained thousands of illegal immigrants under the auspices of "detaining and deporting unauthorized immigrants who've been convicted of crimes." While it may be an admirable aim, the facts don't match up to ICE's claims (big surprise):

The FOIA request for information on all immigrants in detention on Oct. 3, 2011, turned up a list of nearly 32,300. Forty percent of those held by ICE had not been convicted of a crime, nor were they awaiting criminal trial. Despite what the term "illegal immigration" implies, simply being in the country without status is a civil, not a criminal, offense.

That's about 13,000 non-criminals sitting in detention centers funded by taxpayer dollars and, in some cases, directly benefiting private corporations. With more and more politicians looking to grab voters by touting tough immigration "reform," this will only get worse.

With the expansion of federal surveillance laws and the increase of so-called "secret laws," the government is slowly turning its citizens into criminals, often with the assistance of local law enforcement. Combine this with the still-existent "Can I see your papers?" provision of the Patriot Act, in which a 100-mile area along the US borders is basically a "Constitution-free" zone, and it's easy to see why a declining prison population isn't in our future.

While we may not be at the point where police are sweeping up so-called dissidents with door-to-door raids or locking people up for political reasons, it's really hard to see this as anything more than inevitable. And at what point do you decide that it's enough of a police state to start taking action? Is everything manageable now, but let's give it a few years? Or do we decide that this has gone too far already and a rollback is needed? Even worse, it may be too late. The Patriot Act is over a decade old and no reduction in its powers has seriously been considered by our representatives. The War on Drugs has 30+ years of increasing power and no politician has actively moved towards anything more than some slight decriminalization for medicinal marijuana (which often gets re-criminalized) or has even broached the subject of ending this so-called war.

The worst part is that we're all paying for it. Our tax dollars are being used to put our friends and neighbors in prison. Our money is used to turn 14-year-old boys into sexual offenders and incarcerate large numbers of minorities. It's extracted complicity and as long as those in power continue to see no reprisal for these actions, it will continue until it's truly too late.

from the forced-virtual-labor dept

There have been many, many reports over the years about just how much "gold farming" in online games comes from China, but a new report in the Guardian is getting plenty of attention for claiming that real world inmates are being used for gold farming in prisons, where the prisons or their bosses end up with the "spoils." A whole bunch of folks have been submitting the story, and it certainly could be happening, but it does seem pretty weakly sourced. It quotes one guy who was in prison half a decade ago and did the gold farming then. Is there any more contemporary evidence that this is happening?

from the pay-to-listen dept

We've noticed lately that music collection societies have been going overboard in demanding more and more money from pretty much anyone who listens to music, claiming "public performances" and assuming that they're worth a lot more than they really are -- almost everywhere you turn. mikez sent in two new stories about collection societies -- both involving operations pushing back on the demands.

The first involves prisons in the UK who are refusing to pay the licensing fees, and thus are telling prisoners (hey look, real thieves!) that they can't listen to music any more in any area where multiple people might be (the kitchen, workshops, restrooms, etc.) since others might overhear it. Yes, listening to music in a prison apparently requires a separate performance license.

The second story involves Spanish hairdressers who are similarly refusing to pay and, instead, are telling customers to bring their own MP3 players to listen to their own music, privately.

The really ridiculous thing is that in both cases all this is really doing is harming musicians. When places play music, it actually acts as advertising for that music -- and these collection societies are basically demanding to be paid for having people promote the music of various artists. So the artists get less promotion and don't get money from places like the examples above refusing to pay. Everyone loses!

from the laugh.-it's-funny. dept

We've often discussed various ways that businesses can learn to embrace piracy for the purpose of making money, but here's a new (if farcical) idea. Hypebot points us to the Pirates Prison Project -- a tongue in cheek suggestion for a way to use piracy to build up one area of the economy: prisons. The idea is that if we just start putting all those file sharers in prison, we're going to need a lot more prisons -- and isn't that just a business opportunity?

from the you-want-prison-riots? dept

As you probably have heard, the US will be shutting down analog TV broadcasts early next year, as the conversion to digital is complete. For most TV watchers, this won't matter one bit. For anyone who watches TV via cable or satellite TV, the change means nothing. It only impacts those who watch TV-over-the-air and who don't have a digitally-enabled TV or conversion box. So, as part of the effort to move the transition along smoothly, the gov't is handing out coupons to individuals that can be used to pay for a converter box.

"We asked them for the coupons and they said they're only available for households. I said, 'We're the big house.' But they didn't buy it."

Now, many might point out that this shouldn't be a big deal, as perhaps the gov't shouldn't be using taxpayer money to subsidize the TV watching habits of prisoners, but the prison officials are claiming that most people don't understand just how important television is in keeping the peace within prisons. The article includes some quotes from folks that suggest that television is a pretty important part of the prison experience in encouraging good behavior and keeping the prisoners connected to the outside world. Who would have ever thought that the conversion from analog to digital TV might lead to prison riots?